slightest real similarity between him and the excellent but weak-kneed Mr. Fearing, whose life is made heavy by the doubt of his inheritance in the next world. Still, though the causes differ, it could be said of Hawthorne, as of Master Fearing, "Difficulties, lions, or Vanity Fair, he feared not at all; it was only sin, death, and hell that were to him a terror." I mean merely that Hawthorne may have found in this character-sketch--Bunyan's most elaborate one, for the typical subject of which he shows an evident fondness and leniency--something peculiarly fascinating, which may not have been without its shaping influence for him. But the intimate, affectionate, and lasting relation between Bunyan's allegory and our romancer is something to be perfectly assured of. The affinity at once suggests itself, and there are allusions in the "Note-Books" and the works of Hawthorne which recall and sustain it. So late as 1854, he notes that "an American would never understand the passage in Bunyan about Christian and Hopeful going astray along a by-path into the grounds of Giant Despair, from there being no stiles and by-paths in our country." Rarely, too, as Hawthorne quotes from or alludes to other authors, there is a reference to Bunyan in "The Blithedale Romance," and several are found in "The Scarlet Letter": it is in that romance that the most powerful suggestion of kinship between the two imaginations occurs. After Mr. Dimmesdale's interview with Hester, in the wood, he suffers the most freakish temptations to various blasphemy on returning to the town: he meets a deacon, and desires to utter evil suggestions concerning the communion-supper; then a pious and exemplary old dame, fortunately deaf, into whose ear a mad impulse urges him to whisper what then seemed to him an "unanswerable argument against the immortality of the soul," and after muttering some incoherent words, he sees "an expression of divine gratitude and ecstasy that seemed like the _shine of the celestial city_ on her face." Then comes the most frightful temptation of all, as he sees approaching him a maiden newly won into his flock. "She was fair and pure as a lily that had bloomed in Paradise. The minister knew well that he himself was enshrined within the stainless sanctity of her heart, which hung its snowy curtains about his image, imparting to religion the warmth of love, and to love a religious purity. Satan, that afternoon, had surely led the poor young girl away from her mother's side, and thrown her into the pathway of this sorely tempted, or--shall we not rather say?--this lost and desperate man. As she drew nigh, the arch-fiend whispered to him to condense into small compass and drop into her tender bosom a germ of evil that would be sure to blossom darkly soon, and bear black fruit betimes." Now, in the Valley of the Shadow of Death, "poor Christian was so confounded, that he did not know his own voice.... Just when he was